Robert Audi, the ARCHITECTURE of REASON: the STRUCTURE and SUBSTANCE of RATIONALITY

Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers

Volume 22 Issue 3 Article 12

7-1-2005

Robert Audi, THE ARCHITECTURE OF REASON: THE STRUCTURE AND SUBSTANCE OF RATIONALITY

W. Jay Wood

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Recommended Citation Wood, W. Jay (2005) "Robert Audi, THE ARCHITECTURE OF REASON: THE STRUCTURE AND SUBSTANCE OF RATIONALITY," Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers: Vol. 22 : Iss. 3 , Article 12. DOI: 10.5840/faithphil200522312 Available at: https://place.asburyseminary.edu/faithandphilosophy/vol22/iss3/12

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The Architecture of Reason: The Structure and Substance of Rationality by Robert Audi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. xvi +286. $19.95 (paper).

W. JAY WOOD, Wheaton College

Robert Audi’s book The Architecture of Reason offers an impressively comprehensive and systematic account of the structure of rationality that unifies the theoretical rationality of reason and the practical rationality of action and desire. It draws together many of the themes Audi has developed in earlier works such as Action, Intention, and Reason (1993), and The Structure of Justification (1993). Though the book covers a wide expanse of philosophical terrain—e.g. contemporary epistemology, meta-ethics, and moral psychology—it is nevertheless rich with examples and replete with helpful, nuanced distinctions. The first of three major sections contains chapters 1 and 2, in which Audi develops a modest foundationalist account of theoretical rationality, one of the twin pillars of his overall architectonic. The epistemic justification of particular beliefs, “focal rationality,” is a matter of a belief’s being “amply well-grounded.” Adequate grounding arises either inferentially from other beliefs or, in the case of basic beliefs, from ultimate experiential sources such as perception, introspection, and memory. Structurally, rationality is hierarchical; substantively, it rests ultimately in experience. These grounds are unified insofar as they tend toward the truth. Audi responds to the dilemma famously posed by Wilfred Sellars for any such foundationalist account of justification. On Sellar’s view, the non-conceptual experience of, say, seeing a tree may not need justification, but neither can it confer any, since only reasons (or propositions) can confer justification. In a Reidian vein, Audi distinguishes between “citing a ground,” which does require that we conceptualize our grounds, and the “fact that I see it” (p. 17). Experiences are not reasons for accepting basic beliefs—they needn’t be conceptualized—but they may nevertheless serve as a kind of warrant. Audi ‘s is a modest foundationalism as it allows the justification conferred by experiential grounds to be overridable, variable in content among believers, and coherence is allowed to play a role in the justification of inferential beliefs (p. 30, 205). In chapter 2, Audi distinguishes between a belief’s being justified and rational. Rationality is more than mere absence of irrationality, but a matter of “entitlement,” or “permissibility,” “roughly, consonance with reason”(p. 52). Any belief that is justified is also rational, but the converse is not true. “[A] rational belief need not be justified, even if the person must have some degree of justification for it” (p. 196). Consider Audi’s example of a juror treated to mixed evidence, who nevertheless forms the belief that the defendant is innocent. The evidence may be sufficient to entitle the juror to this belief while not being sufficient to justify it. Section II, containing chapters 3–6, offers an account of practical reason that is structurally analogous to theoretic reason, containing elements cor- responding to inferential and non-inferential beliefs. Practical reason is the sort of reasoning we engage in to bring about certain goals or ends. If we 382 Faith and Philosophy act to bring about some end, this may be grounded in still another interme- diary desire, but ultimately, all our actions, intentions, and desires are grounded in intrinsic desires, which are the “unmoved movers” of practical rationality, themselves a response to the felt qualities of the experiences we undergo. We want to swim on a hot day because of the intrinsic qualities associated with being in the water. So, foundational desires, like foundational beliefs, have their ultimate basis in features of our experiences. Practical rationality depends crucially on theoretical rationality—but is not reducible to it—for the reasoning we do to bring about our goals and pur- poses depends on its being guided by suitably rational means-end beliefs. “Belief is the crucial connective tissue that links instrumental desires to intrinsic desires on which they are based” (p. 76). So intentional actions bear a structural analogy to inferential beliefs, as they too are based on reasons that explain them. The practical reasons arising out of our desires are unified insofar as they lead us to goodness. If intrinsic desires are desires for enjoyable experiences such as a cool swim or a stirring symphony, does this raise the specter of egoism, of all my action being ultimately grounded in my pleasure or enjoyment? Chapter 4 addresses this concern by crucially distinguishing between my joy being grounded in the pleasurable qualities of the experience and its being grounded in the fact that it is my experience, between wanting to experience the qualities of a cool swim and wanting these qualities for oneself. Chapter 6 exploits this distinction. Assuming that others are equally capable of expe- riencing such pleasures, then they too can be equally rational in pursuing them, and we are thereby given a reason to bring it about that the other swims. Not only does Audi’s account avoid egoism, but he also argues that altruism is rationally demanded by reason. Chapter 5 advances an objective account of practical reason, in contrast to Humean instrumentalism. Reason is not merely the “scout and spy” of desire, as Hobbes once put it. “Desire without belief has no direction” (p. 108); our instrumental desires must ultimately meet the demands of practical reason. Inasmuch as the experiential grounds undergirding Audi’s theory of rationality are internalist and pluralist, he anticipates the charge that his theory is relativistic. In chapter 7, Audi helpfully distinguishes between a variety of different types of relativism, among them, genetic relativism, conceptual relativism, doxastic relativism, and status relativism. While it is true that the rationality of one’s beliefs and desires are relative to their grounds, and that these grounds may be variable among persons (p. 174), Audi nevertheless argues that this is compatible with the objective rationality of belief developed in the first chapters. The book concludes in chapter 8 with an account of “global rationality,” that displayed by fully rational persons who successfully integrate rational belief with right action and desire. Globally rational people don’t necessarily believe or desire precisely the same things, though there are common criteria that globally rational people tend to satisfy. Such persons have integrated beliefs and desires that reflect and are suitably responsive to experience and reflection; they desire their own pleasure and happiness and, insofar as they believe others’ experiences like their own, desire happiness and pleasure for others; they are also moral and value some things as intrinsically good. BOOK REVIEWS 383

Audi remarks that rationality “is a matter of cognitive traits, such as good habits of observation and inference and a tendency to get one’s beliefs into reflective equilibrium.” He also mentions, but doesn’t develop the way “hatred or prejudice” may undermine rationality. Such talk is strongly sug- gestive of thinking about rationality and other intellectual goods in terms of intellectual virtues. Audi, however, only alludes to this in a footnote. The notion of intellectual virtues and vices would not only help to amplify his account of globally rational persons, it would give more prominent atten- tion to the contributions of the will toward the overall rationality of our beliefs and desires. If the will, in its conative aspect, is the seat of one’s desires, concerns, affections, its role is crucial for Audi’s account of rational beliefs, desires, and emotions. Consider his example of the juror who believes rationally in the face of divided evidence. Suppose the juror is a bigot and the defendant a person of color. It is plausible to think that the state of the juror’s will influences the way he assesses the probative force of the evidence, and thus what he is rational in believing. Given the scope of book, it is, perhaps, unfair to object that Audi doesn’t take on still more material. And elsewhere, in “Epistemic Virtue and Justified Belief,” Audi does link intellectual virtues and rationality more directly. In sum, The Architecture of Rationality clearly exemplifies the intellectual excellences it analyzes and recommends. Though wide ranging, it is nevertheless subtle, compactly written, and will repay the close reading and re- reading it so richly deserves.

Reading Hume’s Dialogues: A Veneration for True Religion by William Lad Sessions, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Pp. X + 281. $49.95 (cloth), $24.95 (paper).

KEVIN SCHILBRACK, Wesleyan College

This is the first book length commentary on David Hume’s Dialogues con- cerning Natural Religion. It is welcome in the first place simply because William Lad Sessions is a meticulous reader, and his observations are con- sistently insightful and profitable. But the approach of this book is distinc- tive, moreover, in that it pursues what Sessions calls an internal reading of the Dialogues. “External” interpretations use tools drawn from outside the text itself. They are external, for example, in that they address some contemporary philosophical question that was not Hume’s, taking the form of what Sessions calls “mining operations” that extract pithy propositions or argumentative ore while ignoring the literary matrix from which they arise. Or they may be external in the sense that they read the Dialogues in terms of some other extra-textual context, such as Hume’s life and interests, or eigh- teenth-century intellectual movements, or the history of skepticism. In contrast, Sessions pursues an internal reading that resolutely interprets the text on its own terms, tracing the connections between the individual parts of Hume’s book and supposing (defeasibly) that the work forms a unity in which nothing is extraneous. By taking this approach, Sessions gives atten- tion not only to the arguments made by the characters, but also to “seeing